Wait, What? John Boehner Edition

So I saw the headlines with Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) saying that not threatening to blow up the government's finances by failing to raise the debt limit would be "surrender." But I didn't appreciate the context. Apparently the point is that Obama suggested that, if Republicans really wanted to negotiate about stuff, they should fund the government long enough and extend the debt limit far enough to cover the negotiation period. Boehner said that this would be "unconditional surrender" for the Republicans, and that our government doesn't work like that. (I.e., with unconditional surrender by one side the precondition to have negotiations.) Never mind that, you know, if there were no statutory debt ceiling and even if the appropriations process were such that government shutdowns didn't happen, the House Republicans control a crucial veto point of the U.S. government and would therefore have plenty in their arsenal going forward. Nuclear disarmament is not the same thing as unconditional surrender if you maintain your fleet of fighter jets and big ol' conventional bombs, after all.

No, what flabergasts me about this quote is that what Obama is proposing would be completely pointless from the good-guy point of view, which is to say, it wouldn't actually involve disarming the Republicans at all. It's like the broader point about how you can't, you can't, you can't negotiate over the debt limit because if you do you cement a pattern of brinksmanship over it that will inevitably end in financial armageddon, only in fast-motion. The threat would go from "we'll blow up the world tomorrow!" to "we'll blow up the world next week!" Great. That's real unconditional surrender, guys. You're not surrendering anything. You're surrendering one week of world-non-blown-up, and presumably if you win the battle then in the end it won't matter exactly how many weeks it took before you did so. I might be missing something here, although honestly between myself and John Boehner I trust the analytical abilities of the former a whole hell of a lot more, but if I'm not missing anything, John Boehner is saying that holstering his nuclear gun, in the full knowledge that, unless his adversary does what he wants, he'll be able to take it out again in an hour or whatever, constitutes unconditional surrender. Holstering might even be the wrong analogy because it suggests that the other guys could overpower him or something; it's like lowering the gun to where it's pointing at the other guy's feet instead of his chest. And the other guy doesn't have a gun. Surrender! Surrender, I say!

Seriously, you can't make this shit up.

Save John Boehner!

Or perhaps more like "save" John Boehner.

First, read this post by Jonathan Chait, and then perhaps also read the long-form piece he links to in the first sentence. Basically the point is that John Boehner's ongoing struggles to control the insane right-hand flank of his caucus, which is about 60% of that caucus, are, well, an ongoing struggle, and not getting any easier. Okay, now you're caught up, and I can make my point, which is this:

It seems possible that, sometime in the future, John Boehner might lose his Speakership. Well, okay, as phrased that's a certainty. More interestingly it seems likely that he might lose his Speakership to a Republican, possibly before the end of 2014 or possibly in the next Congress, when it's quite likely we'll still have a Republican majority. But actually I should rephrase this again: it's quite possible that Boehner might, without his party having become the minority, lose the party leadership election, i.e. lose the support of a majority of his caucus. Ordinarily that is tantamount to losing your Speakership, but in this case it might not be, and this is where my proposal comes in.

Suppose we reach a situation sometime early next year, or late this year, where 60% of House Republicans would prefer a different leader. Maybe Paul Ryan, maybe Paul Broun, who knows. They're crazy, and I shan't bother trying to predict their craziness on this score. The other 40% of the Republican caucus, however, still wants Boehner as their leader, and as Speaker. That's about 94 votes for Boehner, and 140 for the designated loon. There are also, in the House of Representatives, 200 Democrats. Now, I honestly don't know what happens if they all vote for Pelosi, who's presumably their first choice for Speaker right now. I think we go into further balloting, and probably eventually one or the other Republican side gives up and they coalesce around one candidate. But what if the Democrats vote John Boehner for Speaker?

That would give him a majority.

A majority most of whom were Democrats.

And it would make him Nancy Pelosi's pet.

Now, this strategy is not guaranteed to succeed. In fact, making it work would be kind of tricky. The ordinary play is that parties hold internal leadership elections and then, when it comes time to vote for Speaker, they all fall in line behind the person who won the internal election. But there are 200 Democrats, so if they were disciplined about things we would only need 18 Republicans, one of whom would presumably John Boehner himself, to go along with it. There are 234 Republicans; that's 7.7% of the caucus required. The more conservative guy could get 92% support from his caucus and yet lose to the fusion Boehner ticket. So we would just need a) for Boehner himself to feel sufficiently desperate to retain his job that he'd be willing to do it using Democratic votes, and to become Pelosi's pet (which might honestly be easier than his current gig, heh) and b) for 17 other Republicans to feel sufficiently loyal to Boehner and/or betrayed, threatened, etc. by the Tea Party types to go along with it.

The former, well, in his heart of hearts I imagine Boehner would do it in a heartbeat, but I'm not sure he'd be able to actually do it in reality. For one thing, he'd almost certainly lose his next primary, so it would be a short-term solution, but if he's lost the Speakership anyway that might be better than the alternatives. As for the latter, they'd also definitely lose their next primaries, so I doubt it would be possible. And I honestly doubt the Democrats will be creative enough to think of it, although if there's one Democrat who might be it's definitely Nancy Pelosi. Still, I think it would be a pretty effective strategy to mess with the Republicans and maybe, just maybe, make it possible to get an act of legislation through the Chamber. The only alternative, I think, is just pure, unremitting chaos as soon as the insurgent faction get a majority of their caucus. Oh wait, that's exactly what's happening right now.

Perhaps John Boehner Would Like To Try Governing?

I am very much in agreement with Jonathan Chait's argument in this post, where he suggests that "[l]ast night’s House vote to approach disaster aid for communities hit by Hurricane Sandy may turn out to be one of the signal moments of President Obama’s second term." The key point is that the relief bill passed despite the opposition of a pretty overwhelming majority of Republicans; specifically, 179 Republicans voted Nay, with just 49 voting Aye. With all but one Democrat voting for the bill, that was enough for passage. But the remarkable thing is that the bill even got brought to the floor in the first place, given the Republicans' long-time tradition of the so-called "Hastert Rule," a.k.a. the Majority of the Majority rule. The idea is that only those pieces of legislation which command majority support among the Republican caucus get brought to a vote on the floor of the House, even if there are 218 Representatives who support some other bill. From what I've heard, in fact, during the previous Congress Boehner tried out an even more hard-line version of that rule, only bringing to a vote those bills which commanded a full 218 Republican votes. Bills for which, that is, zero Democratic support was needed for passage. That's, well, pretty extreme, as it gives the roughly 25 most extreme members of the Republican caucus a veto over all legislation. (Any other group of 25 Republicans also have a veto, but given that Democrats control the Senate and Presidency, it's the hardest-right 25 whose veto matters the most.)

The hurricane relief bill, in other words, passed in rather flagrant defiance of the Hastert Rule. I've heard that it was the second-largest majority of the majority caucus ever voting against a bill that passed. The fiscal cliff deal also passed with minority support among Republicans. That's two violations of the Hastert Rule in January 2013, though they happened in different Congresses. If this trend continues, it could get very interesting. John Boehner has often seemed to show signs of interest in governing. He keeps trying to reach these Grand Bargain-ish agreements with Obama, who keeps wanting to play along, almost like a Grand Coalition except without any diminution of the public antagonism. Then his caucus refuses to cooperate even a tiny little bit, and everything goes all to hell. Well, now he's got a smaller caucus. This means that the hypothetical Obama + Senate Democrats + House Democrats + Moderate fringe of House Republicans coalition is a lot more plausible, because you need a lot fewer of those moderate House Republicans. And they don't even need to be real moderates, so long as they're pragmatists who are willing to do what John Boehner tells them.

The problem for Boehner is, basically, Nancy Pelosi. This screw-the-Hastert-Rule coalition is entirely dependent on massive support from Democrats to keep the number of Republican votes needed to a minimum, and Nancy Pelosi is a lot more left-wing than either the Senate Democratic caucus or President Obama. So there's a limit on how much Boehner can get center-right governance through this strategy, as opposed to centrist governance. And I also wonder whether Obama might not be so willing to be willing to give so much if he can no longer be confident that the bulk of the House GOP will scuttle any proposed deal, no matter how capitulated. Then again, we are talking about a plan that requires a couple dozen Republicans to vote for anything, so there's a limit on how far to the center any legislation can be and get passed. The hope is, however, that the overlap between "far enough left to get the support of Obama/Reid/Pelosi" and "far enough right to get the support of Boehner and ~18 of his caucus" is non-zero, unlike the overlap between things the Democratic leadership could support and things the median House Republican could support.

Unbalanced Inputs Yield Unbalanced Outputs

Nate Silver has what I think is a very good article addressing the question of whether the budget deal was more favorable to Republicans than it should have been, given that Democrats control, you know, two of the three institutions in the legislative process. He makes the point that the deal reached was probably for considerably fewer budget cuts than the median member of the House actually would've liked. Perhaps it was not as far to the left of that median-Representative-preferred position as it should have been, he says, given how far to the left of that goalpost the President and the median Senator are. But it's unreasonable, he says, to argue that because Obama ended up with more cuts than John Boehner's original request he caved more than 100%.

I'd go a step further. I think that not only did the median member of the House want more cuts than they got but also the median member of the House had a very different priority structure than the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House (and also than John Boehner himself, which Nate alludes to). Specifically the incentive to compromise was a lot weaker. Why? Because the alternative to compromise was a government shutdown, which a) liberals think would be even more macroeconomically disastrous than spending cuts, b) John Boehner thought would damage his reputation as Speaker considerably, and c) Tea Party-style Republicans, who right now think that the federal government is quite simply in the business of doing evil, might even have preferred to simple budget cuts, and though that's a bit of a stretch it's certainly clear that a whole lot of Representatives didn't disprefer a shutdown very emphatically. That means, of course, that they ought to be in a stronger negotiating position, because their threshhold for how much of their own way they need to get before they're willing to take the deal is naturally a lot higher than their adversaries. The House, the Senate, and the President are all veto players in this game: any one of these institutions could, in this instance, force a shutdown. Since the weapon each side wielded was the shutdown, it follows that the side most willing to use its weapon would end up with the best result. I never thought we were going to win this budget battle. Elections have consequences, people: elect a House comprised of radical Republicans, and you're going to get policies that look kind of radical and Republican.